Alex is a slippery Salmond

ALEX Salmond is redefining what most of us understand by independence.

Post-national liberation, countries chuck out foreign armies, adopt their own currencies and elect or install their own heads of state.

Salmond's Scotland would retain the Queen, the pound with the Bank of England in control, Nato, and accept the military bases and nuclear obligations of a foreign power.

Under Nato, in the unlikely event of England being attacked, Scotland would be compelled to go to war against the attacker. And he calls this independence?

It's obvious that the subtext is that Salmond realises the likelihood of a two-question referendum, which would doom independence anyway, is fast disappearing and that the only way he can persuade the undecided with unionist leanings to say yes to separation is to bin all the fundamental Nat policies and present the result as quasi-federalism. Or devolution max - slippery but typical.